Currently, the character encoding for source files needs to be configured individually for each and every plugin that processes source files.

Life would become easier if there was a dedicated POM element like ${project.build.sourceEncoding} which could be used to specify the encoding once per entire project.

Adding this element to the POM structure can only happen in Maven 2.1. For Maven 2.0.x, the value can be defined as a property, thus plugins could immediately use ${project.build.sourceEncoding} expression, whatever Maven version is used.

Affected Apache plugins:

maven-compiler-plugin (source processing)

maven-javadoc-plugin (source processing)

maven-resources-plugin (contents filtering)

maven-plugin-plugin (javadoc extraction)

maven-jxr-plugin (source processing)

maven-pmd-plugin (source analysis)

maven-changes-plugin (velocity template processing)

Affected Codehaus plugins:

taglist-maven-plugin (javadoc extraction)

plexus-maven-plugin (javadoc extraction)

Please see [0] for the related thread from the mailing list, and [1] for some further descriptions.